Product Code Database
Digg (stylized as digg) is an American social bookmarking news aggregator, with a feed that displays the internet's most popular content (Most Dugg), Newest, Trending, and content that’s "Heating up." It was re-launched in its second-to-current form in June 2025, and its current form in May 2026.
Originally launched in 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson, Digg began as a web platform that allowed people to submit links (especially user generated content) and then let others vote on it, up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. The website became a sensation, amassing millions of users and quickly gained the reputation of being one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups, driving significant traffic to content creators and publishers. After a poorly received redesign in 2010, its audience plummeted and much of its user base migrated to its competitor Reddit. Rose sold the company to Betaworks in 2012 and for more than a decade, the site existed as an editorially driven webpage of curated content.
In 2025, Rose re-purchased Digg with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and re-launched it as a rebooted version of Digg's news aggregator with digging and burying features restored and the tagline: "The front page of the internet, now with superpowers." The open beta launched to the public on January 14, 2026 but was shut down two months later, on March 14, 2026, with Digg CEO Justin Mezzell citing the "brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed" and an "unprecedented bot problem."
Mezzell said Rose would return to join the team full-time in April and make the successful relaunch of the site his primary focus.
In 2025, Rose re-purchased Digg with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and re-launched it as a rebooted version of Digg's news aggregator with digging and burying features restored and the tagline: "The front page of the internet, now with superpowers." During its closed beta stage, it offered 21 generalized communities such as gaming, technology, and entertainment, and was open to 67,000 users on an invite-only basis. Its open beta launched to the public on January 14, 2026, closed on March 14, and launched again on May 11 as a X tech news aggregator using AI.
Rose told The Verge that he launched the site because "I thought, well, this would be an improved, more social version of Slashdot. And as being a geek, I kind of wanted to just figure out: Is there something here? Are there nuggets that the editors of Slashdot are overlooking that the masses would come together and vote on and bring to the surface?"
At the time of Digg's launch, there wasn't a way to vote on a piece of content akin to a Like button. Digg's creative director Daniel Burka came up with the idea for a Digg button. "Burka picked a really cool color palette — he made it yellow. And we went back and forth on whether it should be an arrow or a thumb. He designed a little thumb, and I didn’t like the way some of the fingers looked, so we redesigned it. We went back and forth a few times there. And we eventually got to this idea of a thumb going up with a number next to it, which, again, I know it sounds simple, but we’ve never seen that before."
Digg allowed users to discover and share web content by submitting links and voting them up ("digg") or down ("bury"). The platform aggregated these votes into dynamic lists of trending content, with voting accessible both on Digg.com and through "digg" buttons embedded on external websites.
Digg underwent several updates in its early years, including the release of Digg v2 in July 2005 with a redesigned interface, friends list, and streamlined voting.
Also in July 2005, Rose launched a weekly tech/comedy video podcast with Alex Albrecht called diggnation, where they would discuss the top stories shared on the website.
In August 2006, BusinessWeek profiled Digg and Rose, with a cover story and a headline that read: "How this kid made $60 million in 18 months". Written by technology journalist Sarah Lacy, the profile trumpeted Rose as the poster child of the new wave of internet startups. According to TechCrunch, the magazine instructed him on what to wear and props to bring which "highlight(ed) him as a young entrepreneur for the three and a half hour photo shoot." After putting headphones around his head and flashing a thumbs up, Rose asked the magazine not to use the photo. They did not heed his request.
In 2006, Digg v3 introduced content categories like technology, science, and entertainment, along with a "view all" section, followed by additional interface changes in 2007.
By 2008, Digg's homepage was attracting over 236 million visitors annually, according to a Compete.com survey. Digg had grown large enough that it was thought to affect the traffic of submitted web pages. Some pages experienced a sudden increase in traffic shortly after being submitted; some Digg users refer to this as the "Digg effect".
In July 2008, the company took part in advanced acquisition talks with Google for a reported $200 million price tag, but the deal ultimately fell through.
Adelson stepped down as CEO on April 5, 2010, to explore entrepreneurial opportunities, months before the launch date of Digg v4. He had been the company's CEO since its inception. Rose stepped in temporarily as CEO and Chairman.
Digg's v4 release on August 25, 2010, was marred by site-wide bugs and glitches. Digg users reacted with hostile verbal opposition. Beyond the release, Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another's postings, flooding the site with articles only from these users and making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page. Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic, exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg's. High staff turnover included the departure of head of business development Matt Van Horn, shortly after v4's release.
Following the redesign debacle, Digg experienced a mass exodus of users to rival site Reddit. While Digg’s traffic plummeted by a quarter in the following month, Reddit’s traffic grew by 230% in 2010. The site never recovered from the Digg v4 design and continued to languish over the next two years. By July 2012, Digg's monthly unique visitor count had fallen 90 percent from its peak.
On July 20, 2012, new owners Betaworks announced via Twitter that they were rebuilding Digg from scratch, "turning Digg back into a start-up". Betaworks gave the project a six-week deadline. Surveys of existing users, collected through the website ReThinkDigg.com, were used to inform the development of a new user interface and user experience.
The "rethought" Digg reset its version number and launched as Digg v1 a day prior to the Betaworks project deadline, on July 31, 2012. It featured an editorially driven front page, more images, and top, popular and upcoming stories. Users could access a new scoring system. There was increased support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Digg's front page content was selected by editors, instead of users on other communities like Reddit and a major shift from previously featuring content using a Digg score algorithm.
In response to the announced shutdown of Google Reader, Digg announced on March 14, 2013 that it was working on its own News aggregator. Digg Reader launched on June 28, 2013 as a web and iOS application. An Android app was released on August 29, 2013. Digg announced that it would shut down Digg Reader on March 26, 2018.
During the BuySellAds era, Digg was kept as an editorially curated homepage in the mold of the Betaworks version, staffed with an editorial team of five responsible for the day-to-day content, producing 150 to 200 posts per day, with 12 of them curated into a daily email. "We sought out people who (were) in tune with the heartbeat of the internet and are familiar with how content bubbles up and becomes viral. While Digg's purpose isn't necessarily to showcase all the viral content of the web, we try to find the things that are most interesting that should get more attention." explained Garland.
Digg was later acquired by Money Group for an undisclosed amount.
In April 2025, an early access community called Groundbreakers was opened with a $5 sign-up fee, capped at 23,000 signups. Groundbreakers hit their maximum capacity on April 21, 2025. Groundbreaker members were promised "updates, mockups, and experiments" and a "front-row seat to how Digg is being rebuilt." Users who joined Groundbreakers reserved their username and were promised a badge on the new reincarnation of the platform when its open beta later released.
Its open beta opened to the public on January 14, 2026, with all users able to join and start their own communities on nearly any topic, and previous groundbreakers receiving their badges. Two months later on March 14, 2026, Digg closed again, calling it a hard reset. Citing "an unprecedented bot problem" and "the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed." Mezzell announced that Kevin Rose would be returning to the team full time starting the first week of April.
On May 11, 2026, it was rebooted again as an AI news aggregator taking from X ( formerly called Twitter). An email to beta testers said that now, the site's goal was to "track the most influential voices in a space", and to "surface news worth paying attention to". Digg said on their homepage, that they are doing this because of the same bot problem that shut them down four months ago.
Digg hired computer scientist Anton Kast to develop a diversity algorithm that would prevent special interest groups from dominating Digg. During a town hall meeting, Digg executives responded to criticism by removing some features that gave superusers extra weight, but declined to make "buries" transparent.
However, later that year Google increased its page rank for Digg. Shortly afterwards, many 'pay for Diggs' startups were created to profit from the opportunity. According to TechCrunch, one top user charged $700 per story, with a $500 bonus if the story reached the front page.
Digg Patriots was a conservative Yahoo! Groups mailing list, with an associated page on coRank, accused of coordinated, politically motivated behavior on Digg. Progressive blogger Ole Ole Olson wrote in August 2010 that Digg Patriots undertook a year-long effort of organized burying of seemingly liberal articles from Digg's Upcoming module. He also accused leading members of vexatiously reporting liberal users for banning (and those who seemed liberal), and creating "sleeper" accounts in the event of administrators banning their accounts. These and other actions would violate Digg's terms of usage. Olson's post was immediately followed by the disbanding and closure of the DiggPatriots list, and an investigation into the matter by Digg.
Alexis Ohanian, founder of rival site Reddit, said in an open letter to Rose:
Disgruntled users declared a "quit Digg day" on August 30, 2010, and used Digg's own auto-submit feature to fill the front page with content from Reddit. Reddit also temporarily added the Digg shovel to their logo to welcome fleeing Digg users.
Digg's traffic dropped significantly after the launch of version 4, and publishers reported a drop in direct referrals from stories on Digg's front page. New CEO Matt Williams attempted to address some of the users' concerns in a blog post on October 12, 2010, promising to reinstate many of the features that had been removed.
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